Posted on 10/08/2021 5:08:18 PM PDT by White Lives Matter
I’m just glad he’ll beat the record of that piece of schitt John Glenn
It would but presumably they've put him through a rigorous physical.
Do they still put astronauts through the centrifuge test? I'm 66 and, IMO, not in bad shape for my age but I don't think I could take that.
I just hope they have a back up system in case the parachute doesn’t open. Last time they were coming down in the dragon capsule by chute, the thrusters didn’t fire before hitting the ground causing a hard landing.
LOL True enough!
Which one do you think is more likely to kill you?...
Kirk... I mean Shatner... had a fairly large part in Judgement at Nuremburg, and imho he delivered a fairly memorable performance.
(and Galaxy Quest is great!)
Just a note to Jeff Bezos…you may be sending Captain Kirk into space on the 12th, but if anything bad happens, you’ll be dealing with Denny Crain when he lands.
I’m sincerely hoping that Shatner does a double take, looks out a viewport, then in feigned horror looks at the camera gesticulating wildly and saying, “There’s something on the wing!”
—
LOL!
Shatner is keeping faith with a better time.
My guess is for those going into the astronaut training programs, yep.
But Shatner isn’t going through the official training programs.
This is a go up/come down short shot.
Absolutely!
That was a movie I really appreciated-Judgement At Nuremburg...
There was a scene that stuck with me all these years from that movie. (I know you’ve seen it, this is for the benefit of those that haven’t, and...it has been so long for me, that I am weaving into what I remember vs what I read about the Judge whose story is told. I should watch it again-I don’t know if I am remembering it accurately.)
In court that day, they had seen video of the concentration camps, the evil. The utter evil. Today, to many people, they don’t even blink an eye seeing a bulldozer push a bunch of emaciated bodies into a trench for mass burial. But back then, that was evil, on film, that people had NEVER seen. In real life, the Judge played by Spencer Tracy had seen the flims for the first time, and was simply horrified.
Then, that night, he went out to have dinner and drinks at a beer cellar with a widow, a woman whose Nazi husband had been executed for war crimes.
In that beer cellar, life was returning to the German citizenry. These people were happy to have the war over, and they were having a grand, gregarious time in that beer cellar as anyone who has ever been to the right one in Germany knows they can have. The jovial, genial, happy and grinning faces were all singing and banging their beers on the table, the whole place.
The Judge, looking at all of this, was experiencing a cognitive dissonance that was nearly making him mad. How could these people, these happy people, these friendly people, these fun loving people, have tattooed people’s arms, kept detailed ledgers, herded them mechanically into Zyklon-B showers and then incinerated those they could, and simply left the rest for the Allies.
I have always kept that in mind.
There is nothing that keeps us in the USA today from being them in Germany in 1948 except American Exceptionalism and The Constitution. And when the Constitution becomes just another piece of paper (as it is) then American Exceptionalism will disappear, and it is in that time, we must guard most vigilantly against falling into that abyss that they did.
Agreed. As I went through life, John Glenn really let me down.
Not only a Democrat, but...a corrupt one.
Not only a Democrat, but...a corrupt one.
When I read “The Right Stuff,” I got the distinct impression that Tom Wolfe was disdainful of John Glenn from the get-go.
When I got my first library card as a kid in Fairfax, VA, the first book I checked out was about the Mercury 7 astronauts...
The second book was “30 Seconds Over Tokyo”...:) (I was eight at the time)
Yes-I got that impression from the movie too...:)
“...“man with the butter-knife tied to a stick
(as Eddie Rickenbacker used to say)...”
-
I can find no reference to this...
So you were a bookworm too?
Fairfax, VA? I went to high school in Springfield. (Navy brat.) Small world.
I am a bit of an aviation nut, and the reference was made in the book “The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, James Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh and The Epic Age of Flight” by Winston Groom.
I have read more aviation books than I can mention, and this one was one of the best written and most highly entertaining of them.
Eddie Rickenbacker was one stud of a man, and in reading the details of his story, it is easy for me to see how generations of young men regarded him as a man’s man. He was smart, tough, determined, did not mince words, did not lie, and was relentless in his pursuit of excellence. He became a fearless killer in combat after initially suffering from air sickness and fear of heights when he learned how to fly. He suffered no regrets about killing men in air combat, because he viewed it and destruction of the plane, and said he would have been delighted to hear that the pilot survived, which in those days, they mostly didn’t. (He talked about the first time he saw a German pilot use a parachute escaping from a burning observation blimp...)
The story goes into great detail about the terrible injuries he suffered when a Eastern Airlines DC-3 he was on crashed on approach into Atlanta, and he spent the night smashed up against the dead body of the navigator unable to move, his rib bones protruding from his chest, eyeball out of its socket hanging on his face, and multiple serious broken bones including a crushed hip socket and two other pelvic fractures, fractured skull, and crushed elbow. When they found the plane in the morning and cut him out, they left him for dead and tended to others they thought had a better chance of surviving. When he was in the hospital, he heard on the radio that his death was imminent, even in his state, he managed to throw a pitcher of water at the radio and curse.
Then, when his plane got lost, ran out of fuel and crashed in the Pacific, he spent 24 days adrift with the other survivors, and they all grew to hate him with a white hot burning passion because he simply would not let them die. They got to the point they wanted to live just to spite him. And he was apparently just fine with that. He was never one of those people who had a need to be liked.
Near the end of his story in the book they referenced how after he had a stroke and then contracted pneumonia “...at 82, he had used up the lives of a dozen cats, but couldn’t escape what he always referred to as ‘the old man with a knife on a stick’...”
I mis-remembered the “butter knife”...:)
All in all, an astonishingly remarkable man.
Funny. I was a terrible, terrible student, and I got off to a bad start and never caught up, it turned out I was so nearsighted I couldn’t even see anything on the chalk board, so I got far behind, and never caught up until I went to college after I got out of the Navy (with the help of a civilian contractor who I was working with on a new system installed on our planes to monitor engine performance...he was also teaching a college level algebra course to sailors on the carrier). He asked me what I wanted to do when I got out of the Navy, I told him I wanted to get into one of the sciences, but...I could not do math. I couldn’t even add fractions. Adding 1/4 to 1/2 was beyond me. So, he convinced me to take his course, and he tutored me...:)
I owe that man such a debt of gratitude (Jerry Wouters from Detroit Diesel Allison, if you are out there and read this-you made a difference in my life!). I did try to find him and wrote him a long letter, but never heard back.
But, that being said-when I got my library card, even though I was a complete incompetent at school, I read like mad. At eight, I read Moby Dick and loved it. Still do. And I read like a fiend up until the age of 13, when my family returned the United States after being overseas for half a decade in Japan and the Philippines, but...I just stopped reading for pleasure.
Then, when I was 19 and on a deployment, I picked up “The Lord of The Rings” and began to read for pleasure just to pass the time. It lit a fire in me, and up until my mid-fifties, I read ferociously. When we went on vacation for a week, I would bring five books from the library and burn through all of them. I was one of those people who would read until 4 AM.
Then, my eyesight began going bad, and I became unable to read more than about five minutes before my eyes would begin to burn, blur, and water. I have spent thousands, seen the doctors, had eyedrops, tried reading glasses, trifocals, bifocals, but nothing really worked. I just can’t read anymore the way I used to, and boy, does that bother me. Now, I listen to audiobooks, and...well, they can be fun, it doesn’t engage my brain the way books used to.
Kindle doesn’t really work well for me, but...I do buy specific books like ‘Atlas Shrugged”, “The Road to Serfdom”, “Blacklisted by History” and “Basic Economics: A Citizen’s Guide to The Economy”, because I found that all the marks and notes in margins I made were completely useless. You can’t find a quote that way...at least I can’t. But boy, you sure can with an eBook!
When I read, I used to become completely immersed in books, almost as if I were in them. Audiobooks are entertaining, but...not in that way. Plus, you have to cut yourself off from your surroundings to listen. Nobody wants to listen to someone ELSE listening to an audiobook! On the positive side, all those years I commuted an hour or more to work, and an hour or more home, listening to the crappy radio news...now I listen to audiobooks (and podcasts) and that is far, FAR better.
So...short story long...I have been an avid bookworm...:)
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